The moment he stepped out of the entrance hall, beyond the castle's sheltering walls and into the open air, Ron felt the full discomfort of it hit him all at once, sharp and sudden, stealing the breath from his chest.
Harry's Invisibility Cloak kept off the worst of the rain reasonably well enough, but warmth was an entirely different matter—it offered none at all.
A north wind, bitter enough on its own to drive the whole world into winter, cut against his exposed skin.
His already-stuffed, aching nose grew worse in the cold.
But Ron had no attention left to spare for his misery just now. He watched Malfoy and Parkinson walking gradually away ahead of him into the misting rain, their outlines growing fainter and softer with distance, and his expression shifted gradually from plain confusion into something closer to shock.
Judging by the direction the pair was headed, they seemed to be making straight for the Black Lake, out in the open where the wind hit hardest.
A walk? Were they really just going for a walk, in this?
"Oh, do we really have to be stupid enough to follow them, Ron? In this weather?"
Lavender grumbled beside him; her voice muffled slightly by the wind.
Harry's Cloak was a wonderful thing, certainly, in its own way—but Lavender would much rather have used it, if she'd had her own choice in the matter, to sneak off somewhere warm and cozy and private with Ron for a quiet afternoon than play some childish game of tailing people about the grounds in this kind of wind and rain.
Ron caught his own lower lip between his teeth, weighing it.
Strictly speaking, if he thought about it, his actual task today was only to catch Malfoy and Parkinson in the act of trying to break into Professor Watson's office.
Whatever other foolishness Malfoy chose to get up to beyond that really wasn't his business to worry over.
Which meant, technically, he could simply turn around now and go back to wait in the Great Hall as originally planned.
And yet, watching the two distant figures recede gradually into the hazy drizzle ahead, Ron's brow furrowed despite everything.
"No—I want to see just what Malfoy's actually playing at out here. Something's off."
He hesitated a moment over it, then added, glancing at her, "You don't have to come along, Lavender, if you'd rather not. You can wait for me back in the castle."
In the end, though, they went together.
The Cloak wasn't quite like it had been back in first or second year, when it could easily have covered all three of them at once with room comfortably to spare. Now that the three of them had all shot up in height over the years, it barely stretched far enough to fit two people together.
Fortunately, the foul weather gave Ron and Lavender some useful cover of its own—in the rush and the wind, the Cloak flapped and slipped about awkwardly, baring a bit of them here and there as they hurried along, but there was no one around in weather like this to notice the gap.
They caught up with Malfoy and Parkinson down by the lakeshore soon, closing the distance.
A walk. They're really, actually just taking a walk out here?
Watching the pair some twenty or thirty feet ahead of them—arms linked together, strolling along the water's edge straight through the mist and rain as though it were the finest spring morning—Ron felt something in his own mind quietly give way beneath him.
The Black Lake's waters, which normally lapped gently right up against the grassy embankment, had in this howling gale already risen well over it, drowning the roots of a whole row of willows standing along the bank.
Ron sidestepped a sudden patch of icy, creeping water, shaking his head slowly at the whole scene.
"Malfoy's completely, lost it, hasn't he."
But at that observation, something of the madness of it seemed to catch in Lavender too, unexpectedly.
"Oh, I'm suddenly finding this rather fun, actually, Ronnie," she said, tucking her arm through his own beneath the shared Cloak, grinning despite the cold.
"It's romantic, isn't it!"
"Romantic?"
Ron gave her a sideways look. "I think you've gone and lost it too."
Having more or less decided by now that Malfoy was simply in the grip of some sudden fit of madness, and not actually off scheming anything worth watching, Ron was fully ready to turn around and head back to the castle—but Lavender wasn't having any of that idea.
She begged him, tugging at his sleeve, to keep walking with her along the lake's edge a while longer yet, enjoying the strange atmosphere of it.
So, on the two couples went, each pair drifting slowly along the darkened, wind-churned water at their own distance.
Ahead of them now lay the dense edge of the Forbidden Forest, dark against the grey sky. Half a mile off in the other direction, smoke curled up "warmly" from the chimney of Hagrid's distant hut.
Blocked ahead by the looming treeline, Draco and Parkinson left the open lakeshore behind and began making their way instead along the narrow border running between the forest and the open grounds, still walking close together.
Having caught a chill the night before already, and now having stood half the afternoon out in the biting cold wind besides, Ron already felt his own head going hazy and unfocused. He was fairly sure, by this point that he'd developed a fever on top of everything else.
Malfoy had better actually be up to something sneaky out here, or when we get back to the castle, I'm chucking you straight into the Black Lake myself, Harry.
Ron muttered the threat under his breath, shaking his aching head hard to try to clear his blurring vision.
"Hey, Ronnie—look—"
Lavender gave a small, startled gasp beside him.
"What is it?"
Ron, who'd just been shaking off a fresh wave of dizziness, realized he'd lost sight of the pair ahead for one brief instant, and when he looked again, Malfoy and Parkinson had vanished from view.
"The Forest—they've gone straight into the Forest? Are they going to visit Professor Rahansen, maybe?" Lavender said, a little flustered now, sensing herself that something about this had changed.
A walk in the rain, however odd, she could understand well enough. But heading into the Forbidden Forest itself in weather like this—that needed some explaining she couldn't quite supply.
"I doubt it, somehow. Malfoy's got no business at all with that professor, far as I know."
Ron drew two sharp, steadying breaths, his own instincts sparking suddenly, back to life despite the fever fog.
"Come on, keep up, Lavender—I've got a feeling we're about to find something out here."
Trudging heavily over the sodden grass, Ron and Lavender entered the forest together at the very spot where the two Slytherins had slipped in ahead of them.
One step past the treeline, and the world around them went dark.
In the steady rain, visibility inside the dense forest was dismal at absolute best, the canopy was swallowing what little grey light there was.
Anything more than twenty or thirty feet away dissolved almost immediately into vague black shapes; tangled vines and thick plants sprawled wild and untended beneath the deep shadow cast by ancient giant trees that blocked out the sky entirely.
Worse more, after the day's steady rain the ground right at the forest's edge had turned to thick, sucking mud, forcing Ron and Lavender to slow their pace considerably for fear of losing a boot to it with each step.
This, at least, whatever else it was, had nothing to do with romance anymore.
Ron pressed doggedly forward regardless, turning the puzzle over in his mind as he walked.
Malfoy must be hiding some secret out here in the Forest, to be circling around this cautiously, taking this much trouble over it—but—
"Odd. Where did they actually go, then?"
Lavender voiced the exact question at precisely the moment it crossed Ron's own mind too.
He looked around now, turning in place. On every side, nothing but shifting tree-shadows and swaying, dripping branches met his eyes, dark and thoroughly grim in every direction.
But there was no sign anywhere of Malfoy or Parkinson, not a footprint or a voice.
"Ronnie, are we—"
Lavender's voice trembled as she said it, the eerie, closing-in wood finally getting the better of her earlier nerve.
"Don't worry so much, Lavender—"
The wind roared suddenly into the dense trees and came back out sounding uncannily like a wailing banshee, the sound raised the hair on both their necks.
Ron's stomach was doing somersaults now beneath his calm words, but however hard he strained his eyes against the gloom, he still couldn't make out a single living soul anywhere near them.
"Oh—I've got it, I think!"
Struck by a sudden idea, Ron dropped down low and looked hard at the churned, muddy ground directly beneath his own feet.
He could simply follow the footprints Malfoy and Parkinson had surely left behind in the soft mud, right straight to wherever they'd actually gone.
Congratulating himself briefly on his own cleverness, Ron opened his eyes wide and scanned the ground carefully—and after only two quick glances, went cold all over, the small comfort of his plan was collapsing.
There were footprints pressed clearly into the mud, right enough, easy enough to follow at first—but less than two feet ahead of him, they simply, stopped dead, as though the two people making them had ceased to exist mid-steps.
So—
Swish, swish—CRACK!
A vivid red light, dazzling as a shooting star's trailing tail, flared suddenly bright in the gloom and vanished again just as fast—and when it had faded, two figures crumpled silently to the wet ground.
"Hee hee."
A soft, unpleasant laugh rose up amid the patter of rain against the leaves.
"They followed you around the whole way like a couple of puppets on strings, didn't they."
"Hmph. I knew it would go this way—just as pathetic as Potter always is. It's almost sad to watch, really."
There came a soft rustle of movement somewhere close by in the dense bushes.
"Should we take the Cloak while we're at it? Might come in useful for us later."
"No. No need for that—we'll just drape it back over the pair of them. Hagrid and the professor aren't far off from here in the trees; I'd rather they not be found too soon."
More strange, indistinct sounds followed in the dark.
"Ugh, that smell coming off him... it's making me feel sick, honestly."
"Enough talk. We don't have that much time left to waste here."
Half an hour later. The Gryffindor common room.
For a second-year student, the Mending Charm itself was nothing especially advanced or difficult, a spell most of them had already half-mastered.
But actually using it to fix a fully shattered chandelier, a damaged portrait, a chest of drawers left with splintered hole in its side, and a sofa spilling its stuffing everywhere across the floor—that combination was still enough of a challenge for a group of second-years with rather shaky, uneven technique between them.
After great effort, plenty of false starts, and under the amused teasing eyes of his classmates and a cluster of watching older third-years lounging nearby, Chazelle finally managed to set the whole common room back to rights.
Having learned their lesson for one afternoon, the whole tired group slumped down together onto the very same sofa they'd just finished repairing, catching their breath at last.
"So, what are you going to do about it, Chazelle?" a boy with black hair asked, looking over at him with curiosity. "Just let them keep your Frisbee confiscated?"
"Not a chance of that, Bruno—"
Chazelle wrinkled his spotty, red-pimpled nose at the very suggestion and leaned back against the freshly repaired sofa, looking thoroughly unbothered by the whole earlier scolding.
"I've heard a thing or two, here and there, about that Weasley prefect—he's not exactly the strictest stickler for the rules. I'm going to go and ask him again today, when he's on his own. And, well, if that doesn't work out—"
Chazelle hesitated a moment there, then shrugged, entirely undaunted by the prospect.
"—I'll just go and pay Filch's office another little visit."
The boys gathered around him, Bruno included, were just about to break out into a knowing, mischievous grin at that plan—when the Fat Lady's portrait swung suddenly open behind them, and in walked an older boy and girl together, their faces cold with something close to contempt, freezing the half-formed smile before it could appear on anyone's face.
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